Dwarf Fortress: Ten hours with the most inscrutable video game of all time

Who knew trying to build a virtual chair could lead to questions of self-worth?

The dwarf fortress, in all its glory. Or, really, a very minor amount of glory, given my progress.

Dwarf Fortress is one of the most complex computer games in the history of computer games. How complex? In the game's discussion forum, one player asserts that after 120 failed games, he can finally "get into the swing of things." One of his many fortress death spirals began, as the downfalls of society often do, with an immigrant dwarf who suddenly succumbed to a "secretive mood." A short time later—kaboom.

First devised by its two obsessive creators in 2002, Dwarf Fortress involves taking a band of dwarves and building them into a miniature civilization. This includes all the implied strategy and resource management: assigning jobs, collecting and storing goods, building and using structures, and eventually defending yourself against other civilizations. In a profile of the game’s co-creators, the New York Timesdescribed Dwarf Fortress as “a series of staggeringly elaborate challenges and devastating setbacks.”

Not only is the game complex, with endless intricacies to the controls and systems, but it’s incredibly archaic-looking, especially for a game released this millennium. Its cast and environments are all rendered in colored characters of ASCII symbols (apostrophes, letters, mathematical symbols). It’s a puzzle constructed in code, a throwback to games like Kroz. Calling it Dwarf Fortress is almost misleading at first—you won't see anything resembling a traditional dwarf here.

While I implicitly understood Dwarf Fortress to be difficult, I couldn't imagine why it was said to be so hard. It seemed counterintuitive to make a game so obtuse it might actually drive people away unless the developers at Bay 12 Games were the Pai Meis of game design, accepting only the most dedicated/masochistic of players. I’ve played complex simulation and management games before (Civilization, SimCity). I’ve won some endeavors and lost others, but the general structure, strategy, and type of thinking involved with these titles has always appealed to me. Could another simulation seriously be that much more difficult to understand than the ones I already knew?

Enlarge/ It's possible to see the game rendered in a slightly less impenetrable art style, but our trial was run in the full glory of representative ASCII character art.

There are rewards to playing a game like Dwarf Fortress: from reading the forums and articles about the game, it's clear that once you have a grasp of the mechanics, the wide-open nature of the game gives you flexibility to do more or less whatever you want. Similar to Dungeons and Dragons, once you overcome the technical execution hurdles, the only remaining major limitation is your imagination. In one account from a now-defunct site, a player builds a coliseum for holding gladiatorial goblin fights to the amusement of the kingdom's rulers; at RockPaperShotgun, one player imagines a deep history for a quiver that is used to fell a clutch of demons, and once its owner dies, the quiver kills every new dwarf that tries to claim ownership.

I decided to give the game ten hours of my life. I set a goal of doing my legit best to avoid using external guides or hints and to hold off using internal explanations unless I felt lost. I’d experiment and explore, seeing what I could ascertain from the user interface and environment and making as much progress as I could by my wits alone. And I learned one thing well: Dwarf Fortress is not a game that will hold your hand.

Disclaimer: Graphical skins and other such add-ons can make the game more palatable, but for the purposes of this piece, I attempted to play it in its original, stripped-down state. There are instructions within the game, and without in the form of wikis and forums, but I wanted to begin at the most basic level, if only to come at the game from a recently trendy (if controversial) design paradigm on discoverability that's flowed from mobile apps to many new indie games: "if you see a UI walkthrough, they blew it". This is admittedly extreme, but I wanted to begin at the bottom to let the game be its most challenging, and then work up from there.

Our hero awakens in unfamiliar typographical surroundings

As my first playthrough begins, I find that I can move around the screen, but I’m not sure to what end. As far as I can see, I’m moving from one obscure symbol to the next. Playing this game is, visually, not entirely unlike reading a quantum physics textbook. I spot some square root signs in the “distance.”

My HUD, so to speak, would have me believe they are the “badlands.” Here there are no trees or vegetation but the surroundings are “mirthful." It’s not clear what they’ve done to deserve that adjective, but it’s a morale high point, so far.

Options have opened up to “embark” or “find desired location.” I embark, and the game warns me to prepare carefully for the journey to “Atêkirth." Possessing little knowledge of what that place is, how I will get there, or what I’ll find upon arriving, I steel my nerves for the worst.

This represents a world, I gather.

Doesn't this look... lovely... ?

Apparently “embark” means “cease movement around the map of Greek symbols,” because now the game is telling me that seven companions and I are here to make an outpost for “the glory of all Kêshshaksem.” The game tells me I have no supplies and it’s Spring now, but I need to get my sustenance act together “before winter entombs me.” Someone’s been reading too much Game of Thrones.

Now the map is punctuation marks, with a few happy faces scattered around. Ah, I think I get it—I chose a location to dig a hole in the ground, and now, having dug a hole in the ground, I have a Dwarf Fortress. So far the only narrative instructions in the game that I’ve gotten so far are the two words in the title.

A collective of dwarves, in what I will eventually come to realize are sinister surroundings.

I now have an overwhelming number of options for modifying my fortress and directing my dwarf peons. Looking at my list of residents, I see a couple of woodworkers, a couple who mainly deal with fish, and an “expedition leader.” Since our expedition has just ended, I make a mental note to eat him first if our winter preparations go awry.

I lose focus and manage to send a text message to my brother about a pregnant, mutual friend and send pictures of Claire Dane’s crying face to my boyfriend. I start cleaning my keyboard with a piece of sticky-tack before I remember my one true purpose: build my fortress, with dwarves. (I think.)

Enlarge/ A fan drawing of a dwarf (affectionately referred to as "dorfs" by the fan base).

I realize I have an option for a military and worry that things could get serious. I further doubt the utility of an expedition leader in this game. Then I stumble into a menu where I can see the relationships my dwarves have with others. The expedition leader worships two gods but is only long-term acquaintances with his fellow dwarves. Now I worry he’s not only useless, but possibly a vigilante who may be plotting my death. I discover somewhere in the menus that I have a wagon.

The only apparent action I can take is to make a burrow. I accidentally create two burrows in immediate succession. I find out I can put dwarves in them. In goes the expedition leader. Live burial.

While I was moving my smiley face icon around the screen before, I can’t seem get it to do it again. I want to put burrows everywhere and put dwarves in them because that suddenly feels like enormous progress in this game. Stockholm syndrome is swift and unforgiving.

The game has been paused this whole time, so I decide to let it run to see what happens. Happy faces, d’s, W’s, and c’s mill around on the screen. I let them run for a few minutes and then check various menus to see if there have been any fruits of the labor that may or may not have happened, theoretically represented by the busy icons moving around on the screen. I can’t find anything. My dwarves may be, for all I know, dying in slow and very low-resolution motion. Time to read some instructions.

The game isn't hard per say, as you mentioned - its just inaccessible. If it had a mouse driven control scheme with a proper interface, it would be much more mainstream.

My favorite part of the game was digging down to the depths of hell and discovering what lay beneath my fortress.

Edit: **It isn't hard to understand its concepts that is, the game play itself is very hard and if you manage to get past the basic necessity losses you will lose some more to the annual raids until you learn proper military tactics and defenses

I'd love to see you do the same with the *Other* insanely hard game, Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup. To be fair it's probably a little bit easier to get into, especially if you play the tiles version. But it is incredibly hard none the less.

The controls take a lot of time to learn. The keys are kind of hacked together and not well-planned, and of course we get an overhaul or new feature to screw with things every once in a while. Still an awesome game and worth the time to learn.

And if anyone wants to give it a shot, this is what I do to coerce the Random Number God to yield better worlds: go into advanced settings for world gen and jack volcanoes UP to about 50 and mineral scarcity DOWN to less than a thousand (season to taste). Embark on a volcano positioned near the intersection of more than one biome, with flowing water. This is about as ideal a setting as you can get.

Why do I play it?: because the complex and quirky AI writes its own oddly compelling narrative.

>Scientifically accurate, but is there even one forgiving part to this game? Just one?

No.This game is for the neckbeards, by the neckbeards.The game can be learned without a wiki, though I would say it would take about a year of playing on and off and seeing what happens. (I did that)The game however has so much depth that it is frightening; you know you are stone cold hooked when you start reading the report tab constantly, just because you are interested in what your epic lady macedwarf is up to.

There are a few good Youtube tutorials about Dwarf fortress that I followed when I tried to play the first time. The one I watched tried to introduce new concepts as required and didn't dump too much information at once, but even then I would watch and re-watch sections while reading the wiki just to figure out what was happening. I haven't played in months, but at least (after about 5 restarts) I got the early part of the game mostly figured out.

As a long-time Angband and roguelike player, I downloaded Dwarf Fortress a few years ago to give it a shot. I played a few times, was very confused, and then my son was born and free time became a distant memory.

One day I'd like to get back into this. It wasn't very welcoming then, and it's nice to see my impressions weren't unusual.

This sounds and looks like the most horrible game ever made. An ASCII version of The Sims with the most unintuitive design, the most meaningless options, and absolutely no ability to understand how your decisions affect the world without reading wikis?

How much do the developers pay you to play it?

I love indie games as much as most of the folks here on Ars, but this title is an example of the worst the genre has to offer.

For practical purposes the game doesn't include any instructions, the external guides are not optional or "cheating". The attraction is that the game's complex internals lead to fascinating emergent behavior and interesting unscripted narratives. Things tend to get especially interesting when plans go awry - a successful thriving fortress can turn into a deathtrap filled with despairing or insane dwarves at very short notice.

If you want to get a glimpse of why some people persevere despite the learning cliff, here are some stories based on game events - note that these are not fan fiction, they are reasonably straightforward retellings of actual in-game events:

I'd love to see you do the same with the *Other* insanely hard game, Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup. To be fair it's probably a little bit easier to get into, especially if you play the tiles version. But it is incredibly hard none the less.

o, X, /, and ctrl-f make DCSS much easier to get along with than earlier rogue-likes like nethack and angband. And even in those, using the numpad to walk around and hit things makes sense pretty quickly.

It may take a while to be successful, but figuring out what you are trying to do (stay alive and kill stuff) is more straightforward than Dwarf Fortress.

For practical purposes the game doesn't include any instructions, the external guides are not optional or "cheating".

This, first mistake here was thinking for even a second that going to the wiki and doing a tutorial was in any way not critical unless you want to spend at least a year experimenting. The game is a huge sandbox, not a theme park, merely reading a ton will not prevent the game from kicking your butt. There is great fun to be had though if you have the right turn of mind (and remember the first rule: losing is fun!). The following helps illustrate the difference between various types of game difficulty and Dwarf Fortress (spoiler'd for size):

Kudos to you for actually having the guts to try and grind it out for as long as you did without consulting wiki. That takes a lot of energy and effort. If you play DF, there's 3 resources you need, and will probably always need no matter what's done to it:

The wiki is an insurmountable pile of information and it really does go hand-in-hand with playing the game. Even veteran, experienced players require the information there.

Youtube is another one. Some people can figure things out once they know the basics. Some people are good at copying those people. I'm the latter.

Cptn Duck is a hero among Dwarf Fortress players and his tutorial videos helped me immensely. They're long, but he's quite good at making things understandable.

And lastly, the bay12 forums. The dudes there are very helpful, very willing to answer questions, and very willing to share their hilarious exploits including their latest mass goblin pitting technique, or their way to make cattle more meaty with a use of a necromancer.

I'm looking to replay an older classic that is visually quite like this (ASCII-based). It was an rpg like game where you began in a dungeon/pit. Unfortunately don't recall much more than that. Somewhat certain it was DOS or earlier.

I've played plenty of ASCII-based games, but the map screenshots in this article are the first to make me think "wow, it's a psychedelic version of my old Apple IIgs crashing due to a corrupt boot disk!"

I'm looking to replay an older classic that is visually quite like this (ASCII-based). It was an rpg like game where you began in a dungeon/pit. Unfortunately don't recall much more than that. Somewhat certain it was DOS or earlier.

That probably casts a wide net...any takers?

The "graphics" and general concepts remind me a lot of the old "empire" game on VMS. But you're probably not thinking of that.

I'm looking to replay an older classic that is visually quite like this (ASCII-based). It was an rpg like game where you began in a dungeon/pit. Unfortunately don't recall much more than that. Somewhat certain it was DOS or earlier.

That probably casts a wide net...any takers?

The "graphics" and general concepts remind me a lot of the old "empire" game on VMS. But you're probably not thinking of that.

Looks very similar. If I'm remembering correctly game starts black and white in the dungeon but when you get outside its colorful. As you move around the map enemies can "swarm" around and often converge on your initiating a "battle" of sorts.

I'm looking to replay an older classic that is visually quite like this (world was drawn with characters). It was an rpg like game where you began in a dungeon/pit. Unfortunately don't recall much more than that.

If nobody here recognizes it, try writing the owner of Vintage Computing & Gaming about it... Either he'll know the title or post the description so his readers can help you identify it.

I'm not against ascii games: I'm a proud NetHack player. But Dwarf Fortress is a game for which an ascii keyboard interface is completely wrong.

If you took the existing game and added proper mouse support, real (zoomable) graphics, tooltips, and so on, you would have a far more playable game: even if you didn't modify the mechanics at all.

If they stopped trying to do what they're trying to do they would be able to do what they're trying to do better.

I'm not entirely sure they could do what they are doing with such an interface. The game is so complex that tile-type graphics just wouldn't work. Tooltips, mouse support, and the rest are all great ideas, but they'd spend as much time implementing them as they would actually developing the game. They'd get in the way of developing the core mechanics too much.

You can achieve a degree of complexity with ascii graphics that you can't with graphics interface, and once you learn the ascii system it tells you vastly more information a lot faster than normal graphics do (I only play ASCII version of Nethack et alia for that reason).

I'd love to see you do the same with the *Other* insanely hard game, Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup. To be fair it's probably a little bit easier to get into, especially if you play the tiles version. But it is incredibly hard none the less.

I would say Nethack is harder than Stone Soup: more dangerous unknown items, and more rigid class based restrictions (I admit I've played very little SS though...)

But even as a seasoned Nethack player I gave up on Dwarf Fortress fairly quickly. I don't think they're in the same league of difficulty....

I'm looking to replay an older classic that is visually quite like this (ASCII-based). It was an rpg like game where you began in a dungeon/pit. Unfortunately don't recall much more than that. Somewhat certain it was DOS or earlier.

That probably casts a wide net...any takers?

The "graphics" and general concepts remind me a lot of the old "empire" game on VMS. But you're probably not thinking of that.

The world is so weird sometimes... I had never heard of this game before today. Then on a preview article about Mew-Genics, I read that "this game sounds a lot like Dwarf Fortress". I look up Dwarf Fortress, I think "interesting!" 3 hours later I go through my RSS feeds and Ars has just put out an article about Dwarf Fortress. Thanks world!

Having tried playing Dwarf Fortress a few times, it feels to me like a few years ago when the game was new the interface was unintuitive but the game was simple enough that you could get it reasonably enough. The problem is that the developer(s?) has been adding game features (complexity!) regularly and just sort of shoehorning them into the UI wherever there is space. Now it is a game with a breathtaking amount of irreducible complexity and a completely inscrutable UI.

I think if the UI were utterly and completely reworked to be usable by mere mortals the game could be a hit on the level of Minecraft. I don't mean some big gitzy 3D rendered thing either, I mean a sensible layout for the menus, integrated help system, and a tutorial mode that introduces game concepts one at a time instead of expecting the user to understand all eleventy billion little nuances and quirks of the game up front.

Honestly, I fear this just wasn't a very shake. I mean honestly this style of review would basically say that Crusader Kings II (poked idly around in menus all day), Victoria II (ditto), Settlers of Catan (made experimental art with game pieces) and a bunch of other really good games were complete crap. Some games are simply different. Some games require you to read the equivalent of a manual. This doesn't mean they are bad games. I mean not everything can be the equivalent of Twister. Hell even Minecraft was completely incomprehensible to this standard for quite some time, and to an extent still is.

Dwarf Fortress is not a simple game. And that's ok. It is a pretty fun game though, and people should play it. I assure you it won't take you 10 hours to get to the good parts either. Just grab a pack pull up a quick start guide and play.

The thing people miss is that the crazy steep learning curve with Dwarf Fortress is a safety feature. I don't want to recall the hours that have disappeared into having 'FUN' in that game...and i have the urge to go back

This pretty closely mirrors my experiences with the game. I love what some people have managed to do with it, but if your read the Let's Plays you'll find that even seasoned veterans have to fight the UI at every turn, and frequently make mistakes due to the bizarre complexities of it.

What the game needs is a fundamental UI overhaul, but since it's still officially in Alpha, that's probably years away, at the soonest.

I definitely appreciated this review and the ensuing discussion. I'd like to point the highlight of the review and the writing style for me was this paragraph:

The Article wrote:

I dig another room on another level, and see the area the dwarf is clearing is made of gray apostrophes and quotation marks, rather than the red of the levels above. As he digs, more dwarves show up, running in and out of the room. I move back up a couple of levels, and, sure enough, the icons designating my stone stockpile are turning from gray equals signs to gray bullets. Little rocks.

The amount of frustration and bewilderment is palpable in this paragraph and it had me laughing quite a bit. "gray apostrophes and quotation marks"; "turning from gray equals signs to gray bullets" and the clincher, "Little rocks." Hilariously well-written.